Hi, On 09/12/2015 08:16 PM, Colin Smale wrote: > Respect to Russ for standing up for his principles in the face of all > this bullying.
Well, to be fair, what you call "bullying" is mostly people standing up for their principles. > Why are > "former railway lines" which are no longer immediately evident on the > ground forbidden so vehemently in OSM when so many other artefacts from > the past are not? Old_name, Roman roads, closed pubs, end_date, etc etc. In my opinion, things that *are* physically there always have a space in OSM (even though I'd draw a line with regards to volatility - if something is likely there only for a few weeks or months then perhaps it shouldn't be mapped, OTOH if the mapper takes it upon him to remove whatever it is when the time has come, then why not). Things that are not physically there *may* be ok for OSM but they all need to be independently justified, and their negative impact compared against their usefulness. The fact that some things without physical manifestation and/or of difficult verifiability are tolerated in OSM must never be a carte blanche for all such things to be included. For example, post code boundaries and administrative boundaries are, by general consensus, welcome in OSM even though they may be hard to verify. But that does not mean that *any* boundary is acceptable. > And why are some esoteric tags to support a minority interest tolerated > and some so hotly disputed? Why are some "mapping patterns" decried so > vociferously here, but apparently they are not actually serious enough > to do anything about? I think that adding an esoteric tag to an exiting object has to clear a lesser hurdle than adding whole esoteric objects, simply because the negative impact is smaller and hence the usefulness required to offset the negative impact is smaller. > What happened to the openness of OSM? That's more rhetoric than useful question. Do you mean openness on the input or output side? Certainly you don't want OSM to be "open" for private doodling. So I guess you will also, in your mind, have some requirement, some hurdle that content has to clear before it gets in. This hurdle exists, and has always existed, and doesn't make OSM un-open; we are just trying to determine where exactly it should be. I think that's part of growing up. Initially we were happy for everyone who participated, and now we're a little more demanding. (It has been hinted in this discussion that there might also be a regional bias. If I were trying to drum up support for OSM in the US, I'd probably also welcome someone who maps abandoned railways, so that I'm not alone at the monthly meetup ;) > If you have the courage of your convictions, you will be > contacting other mappers right, left and centre informing of them of > their "transgressions of the unwritten rules" and reverting their > changes. I, for one, where I survey, will certainly delete an abandoned railway line that is drawn right through a block of flats with no visible trace (and I wouldn't care one iota whether traces of the railway exist in the land parcel boundaries which are invisible to me too). But that's how far my "convictions" go - as long as I don't survey where Russ draws his abandoned railway lines, we're fine. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
